SL Huang - Up and Coming - Stories by the 2016 Campbell-Eligible Authors

Kay tugged her inside.

And then they both froze.

She felt Kay’s hand let loose go of her arm and fall away.

For a moment everything fell away.

Tia wasn’t sure what she was seeing.

The room was square, a cube on the inside as it was on the outside.

Silent movies ran across the high sidewalls.

And there, in the center of the room, suspended in a circle of chromed steel, was a man.

His arms reached outward, his legs spread wide, a living depiction of Da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man. A low-hung loincloth draped his waist, and a myriad of tubes pushed and pulled fluids in and out of veins and into the tall metal carts the syns wheeled around. From the base of the man’s skull a cascade of wires and cables flowed down through holes in the floor. His eyes were closed, but in a restful way. In fact, he did not appear to be stressed at all from his suspension.

Tia recognized the man. Not at first, but then she did. He had aged, of course he would have. His body was gaunt, his hairline far receded, and what hair was left was white and thin, except that of his beard, which billowed from his chin and cheeks unfettered. Still she recognized him. Age had not changed him much from the image on the back cover of Kay’s printed books.

Tia began to speak and then realized she was breathless. She gulped in some air and in one release said, “It’s him.”

“I know,” Kay said softly. “It’s Hugh Howey.”

A huge floor-to-ceiling wave washed the left wall, bathing it in aquamarine. Another followed, and then another, and then the image of a ship’s bow, ornate with an intricately carved angel figurehead, filled the wall. Kneeling on the foredeck of the old wooden sailboat, fastening hooks to the jibstay, was a svelte young woman in full body wet gear.

Kay elbowed Tia’s arm. “That’s Cassandra,” she whispered.

“Who?” Tia asked.

“Cassandra at sea. She’s one of Hugh’s characters. She sails around the world in search of adventure.” She turned her head toward the wall to the right. “That’s Lesley. She lives alone on a space station.”

“They’re characters?”

“I think so. So is he, on the back wall, the boy flying in the jetpack, that’s Billy. He’s one of my favorites.”

“Are these movies from the books?”

“I dunno. I don’t remember Billy ever flying with a jetpack, and I’m sure I’ve read all of the Thorne stories.”

“I assure you,” said a man from behind. “You haven’t read that one.”

Startled by the voice, Tia and Kay spun around.

The voice belonged to one of the doctors, the round-faced man who had been seated at the end of the dinner table, far down from Tia. He was wearing a white lab coat and held his hands clasped together in front of him. He rocked slowly on his heels, sizing the girls up.

“Oh,” Tia said. “We’re so sorry, um, Doctor…” Her mind raced through the faces at the table. “I’m sorry, I forgot your name.”

The man smiled. “Doctor Mills. Quentin is fine.”

“We were…we just, well, we got lost.”

“You got lost?”

Tia nodded.

Quentin looked the two over with a playful eye. “At two in the morning?” He grinned. “I don’t think so.”

“You don’t?” Kay asked.

“It’s all right. We were going to bring you down here tomorrow anyway. He wanted to meet you.”

Tia and Kay slowly glanced back at the body in the middle of the room.

“Is he sleeping?” Kay asked.

“No, he is always awake.” Quentin strolled up beside them and freed a clasped hand to gesture toward the screens. “He’s writing.”

“But,” Tia said, “he’s, just, I mean…”

“The mind is an incredible thing. Below this room is a bioinformatic system, you know what that is?”

“We have them at the botanical garden.”

“So you’re familiar?”

“The university has an entire greenhouse wired up to our bioinformatic system. Vats of algae producing local Archive memory.”

“Yes, a similar concept. He is linked to a series of greenhouses above and below ground. Except this bioinformatic system is quite unique.”

“The cables,” Kay said. “That’s where they go. He’s hooked up to this? This bioinformatic system?”

“We like to say he’s interfaced.”

“What does that mean?” Kay asked. “Interfaced? He’s accessing the system?”

“It means he is the bioinformatic system.”

“That’s impossible,” Kay said.

“No,” Tia said, “it’s not. You’ve created a hybrid organic computational system.”

“He’s not a hybrid in the sense you’re describing. Hugh is a true bioinformatic system.”

Kay stepped closer to the large wheel. Tia and Quentin followed. On closer observation, Tia could see that Hugh was held up on a large X and not merely hanging from his hands. She peeked around to get a better view of the cables going into his skull. There was not much to see. The back of Hugh’s head rested in a smooth golden bowl and each line, each cable, was fastened to a coupler.

“Those plug into his brain?” she asked.

“In a manner of speaking.”

Tia was unsure what to make of their discovery, but Kay was beyond that already.

Kay wasn’t timid. Her intrigue surpassed her surprise.

Tia was composed on the outside, but inside she was trembling. She kept her composure because that’s how she was taught. Her demeanor was required by her lineage, but she did not have the…sobriety. Yes, that was what Kay possessed that she did not. There was composure and then there was sobriety. Kay possessed the sobriety to pull herself from an emotive, reactive state to study a situation, analyze it.

And she was doing that now.

Kay circled Hugh. She moved in closer to examine his stillness and contrasted it with the activity on the walls around them. Her eyes darted between him and the huge images. As a way of confirming her own observation, she began her line of inquiry by repeating Quentin. “He’s writing,” she said.

“Yes,” Quentin said.

She went toward the back wall and pointed up at the twelve-foot Billy. “And we’re watching it.”

“Yes.”

She spun back and waved her hand wide. “All of these?”

“And more.”

A wide smile crept across Kay’s face. She peered at Tia. “I told you he wrote his own books.” She peered into Quentin’s eyes. “So he is really in there?”

Quentin gestured to the screen behind her. Billy was gone. Replaced by the youthful face of Hugh Howey, eyes twinkling, smile charming.

“Oh,” Kay said. “He was such a handsome man.”

The tall avatar image of Hugh glanced down at her, and said, “Thank you.”

Originally published in The Z Chronicles (Windrift Books, 2015), edited by Ellen Campbell and Samuel Peralta, and part of The Future Chronicles anthology series, created by Samuel Peralta.